Machinery, such as aircraft machinery, can generate debris as a function of wear of the machinery components during operation. Where the debris is relatively large, this can provide an indication of the possible failure of the machinery. Extraction of wear debris from a lubrication system filter can be an effective tool for the identification of incipient failure of oil-wetted components. Traditional wear debris analysis methods, such as Spectrometric oil Analysis, suffer from particle size limitations (i.e. they typically detect particles less than 8 microns), and fine filtration present in modern aircraft machinery further reduces the effectiveness of this limited technique. In some cases, an oil filter may be used to capture wear debris in order to obtain information about wear-related failure modes of the machinery. Extraction of debris from such filter elements can be cumbersome and rely heavily on manual extraction and visual inspection of debris, which can be error-prone and inaccurate. Similarly, ferromagnetic particles captured on magnetic chip detectors can be difficult to accurately quantify.
It is desired to address or ameliorate one or more shortcomings or disadvantages associated with existing techniques for quantifying wear debris in particulate form, or to at least provide a useful alternative thereto.